Your local search results are a fickle thing, and we understand that redesigning your site or switching to a different content management system can spell disaster for your online presence. The good news is that you can do hundreds of things to prevent a freefall in your local rankings, but the bad news is that only a few steps really matter out of those hundreds.
So, what actually prevents your site from disappearing in the local rankings during a rebuild or a migration?
1.Keep your title tags and your content the same. If you have two paragraphs of content on a page, stick to those two paragraphs on your new site. Unless your content is bad, keep everything the same. In regards to tags, be sure to review them on your most important page, or the page where you get the most traffic from.
2.Don’t forget about your 301 redirects. You need to do this with every page you’re renaming or relocating. It’s not a bad idea to do this with other pages that have good external links pointing to them.
3.Don’t butcher your Google Analytics tracking code. After you’ve upgraded or redesigned, log into Analytics and make sure that you’re not flat-lining. Even if everything looks okay, wait a few days and check back to see that all of the data is flowing correctly.
4.Ensure that your local listings still point to the correct landing page URL. Your local listings are important to your local rankings, and this is a very simple yet often-forgotten action that can cost you customers and revenue.
5.Don’t assume the user experience is improved. Just because you’ve built a new site doesn’t mean that your customers will like it. It could be loading too slowly or it might simply be confusing to your past customers. Study where your visitors click and scroll by using a click-analytics tool, and keep this in mind before and after your redesign. Another option is to ask a friend or relative to log on and try to use the site.
One final tip we have for you is to ensure the ‘noindex’ has been taken off of your site after your redesign or migration is complete. During the development phase you don’t want your half-completed site to get indexed by Google, so you should ‘noindex’ it with meta tags during the build, but don’t forget to remove this when you launch the site. This is one surefire way to kill your local rankings.
If you can focus on these five major tasks, then everything else should run smoothly. It might be a different story if you’re doing a lot of e-commerce through your website, so please contact us.
